My brilliant Ph. D. student Lara Pudwell,
who among her many other hats is the graduate-coordinator of
the DIMACS REU program
(for the third summer, in a row!), asked me to give one of the
weekly talks to those smart undergrads. I replied that there is nothing I can
possibly talk about that would be of any interest, so she replied: "You are such
a good speaker, so that it would be a good talk even if you talked about nothing".
That gave me the idea to indeed talk about my favorite subject: "nothing", and
at the same time fullfil an old dream of mine to give a talk, and write a paper,
with the absolutely shortest possible title, containing zero characters.
The abstract, however was non-empty.
Added Feb. 18, 2009: I thank Yiftach Levy for spotting an error in the previous version,
that has been corrected. (Beatles->Three Dog Night).
Personal Journal of Ekhad and Zeilberger